Team

Alan Schwartz

Founder and CEO of EnglishCentral has 12 years of experience in speech recognition with AT&T Labs, SpeechWorks and Nuance. He led Nuance's Mobile & Automotive business as VP & General Manager. He then served as the VP for Nuance's Asia Pacific and Japan operations before leaving in 2008 to found EnglishCentral. Alan’s first job out of college was teaching English in China. Alan has a B.A. from Princeton University and a J.D. from Harvard.

Brian Eberman, Ph.D.

President and COO, has overall responsibility for Product and Marketing at EnglishCentral. Before joining EnglishCentral, Brian was CEO of Avenue100 Media Solutions, an education lead generation company, which was acquired by the Washington Post Company in 2007. Prior to Avenue100, Brian led Product Management for the Speech Business at Nuance Communications, Inc. Brian holds thirteen patents in Speech Technology, Internet Search, and Robotics along with a Ph.D., M.S., and bachelor’s degrees from MIT.

Jon Marston

VP of Engineering, began his career at National Public Radio (NPR) Boston affiliate (WBUR) as the technical director for NPR’s popular programs 'Car Talk' and 'Only A Game', and later became head developer of WBUR’s online services. After NPR, Jon was technical lead at IBM Global Services and helped launch the start-up DanceJam.com as the key developer of their interactive video experience. Jon has a BS in Applied Physics Engineering from Cornell University.

Hirofumi Matsumura

Mobile Director & General Manager - Japan, started his career at Meitec, Japan's largest engineering services company. He then worked for Microsoft Japan as the Program Manager responsible for consumer game products. He joined Nuance and led the company's professional organization servicing automotive and mobile customers. He has B.S. in Information Systems from Oxford Brookes University.

Erik van der Neut

Chief Designer, leads interaction design and development at EnglishCentral. Prior to EnglishCentral, at Nuance Communications, Erik led the design of several large telephony and multi-media applications employing speech recognition, including Bank of America, Qantas Airways, Singapore Telecom, and Volkswagen. Erik holds a BA in Psychology and a MSc in Cognitive Science and Engineering from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.

Peter Wolf

Director of Speech Engineering, was an early member of Dragon Systems(now owned by Nuance), and then a researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs(MERL) where he was part of the core team that developed the Sphinx 4 Speech recognition engine along with Carnegie Mellon, Sun Microsystems, and Digital Equipment. Peter graduated from Yale with BS in Computer Science in 1983.